


Start Here

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Half Life Trilogy - Sally Green
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 13:56:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4103431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, Gabriel, at a point between here and there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Start Here

**Author's Note:**

> So you know that Caitlyn Siehl poem that's like "when is a monster not a monster? oh, when you love it"? I feel like Sally Green took that line and just ran with it, and now she's got two books about it and a third on the way.
> 
> Anyway, here's some Gabriel-centric fic, because who doesn't love the person who loves the monster?
> 
> **Spoilers** for Half Wild. There might be some factual inaccuracies between this and canon; I wasn't taking notes when I was reading. But hopefully they're minor.

*

 

If you were to carve open Gabriel's chest, go in between the third and the fourth rib and pull out his heart like some Gift-eating Black Witch, you'd find it already pulped over. Gabriel's heart is a messy, useless thing, heavily edited, each ventricle bared to the open air and written on -- which makes it hurt sometimes, like a tattoo that's still tender.

This isn't strange. A lot of people think the best way to keep something safe is to keep it hidden inside the heart, forgetting that it's not something you can just stop feeling once it's there, the same way you can't shake a pebble from your shoe.

Gabriel organizes the contents of his by city, which he remembers less by their names and more by the strongest sense memory attached to them.

"You lived in America, then?" people will ask him. "What's that like?"

It's like a lot of things, but the first thing Gabriel always thinks of is the sound of lawnmowers. Unnatural, manicured lawns were the American suburban dream, and when they moved to Florida with Dad, Gabriel remembers that bit of culture shock had been _noisy._ You couldn't sleep through it, either, not when you slept outdoors and Mr Next-door wants to mow at the crack of dawn.

Paris, likewise, will always be the chime of the Metro announcing its stop. 

The shape of the kerbs in Antwerp -- from the close-up perspective of a child.

Styrofoam cups of tea, the steam curling across the surface just so, London.

Geneva, the rush of the air-con hitting the top of his head. Even the air tasted different inside, felt different in his nose as he crossed the lobby to talk to a woman about an account he and Michele's mother had left in their -- his -- name. ("Oh, sure," Rose laughs at him, "ask a man about Switzerland and he tells you about a _bank.")_ He hadn't thought Mercury would accept money, but he wanted to have it, just in case. No matter how comfortable he gets in Geneva or how many times he gets shot there, this is what he will always think of first; the decision to step inside that bank that day, the change of the air on his skin.

It's not homesickness, exactly, that he feels for these memories, but they're written in ink on his heart regardless -- pebbles in his shoe. He can't shake them out.

It's raining in northern Germany, early afternoon light turned to an underwater gloom, and the lights have come on in the bookstore Gabriel's in, making everything feel closer and much later in the evening than it really is. He's stepped in to consult an atlas, crosschecking the maps Van had sent with him because his gut is telling him they're not quite up-to-date, and around him, the fains are talking about fain things: petrol prices across the border. Cinema. A parade in Oslo.

Gabriel's stomach plunges downward. It's sense memory.

That's all it takes -- the word " _Norwegen,"_ dropped in a sentence behind him -- and it doesn't matter that he's only ever seen its remotest part.

If America is lawnmowers, France the piped-in tone of the Paris Metro, Geneva the bank where he'd made a plan just like his mother had in that exact spot before him, then Norway -- the whole country, all of it -- is Nathan's hands in his hair.

It's in his heart, written onto the pulp, and there are a hundred things that may happen in Norway yet, but this is where Gabriel's aching heart will always go first; Nathan, Nathan, Norway and Nathan's hands in his hair.

 

*

 

Do you believe in love at first sight?

Trick question.

 

*

 

When Gabriel was younger, living with Maman and Nan in a room in the south of France where the accents were slower, there was this man from across the street.

This was before Blanco, before Roger, before Abigail and her husband Finn, and therefore before the age where Gabriel and Michele learned to watch Maman's boyfriends, the ones who came over and touched her on the arm or the back and looked at them like he needed them to be elsewhere so he didn't have to think about them. 

They lived on a grey, boxy street with grey, boxy rows of housing that ended in a gravel carpark, which they didn't think anything of, because the sky was still blue between the buildings and the pavement was good for chalk squares, a past-time universally appreciated by whets and fain children alike. Gabriel and Michele were at the age where they traded clothes interchangeably, covetously guarded their toys even when implored to share, and spent more time in their own imaginations than they did in the cheap housing where Maman and Nan had to live until they "got back on their feet." At night, they slept out on the flat roof, listening to their neighbors converse, shout, laugh, scream on the streets below. Gabriel slept between Michele and Nan, and didn't even mind in the summer when the standing pools of water on the roof started breeding bugs. Maman would always burn something that drugged them, so they wouldn't bite.

He doesn't remember the man's name -- adults have the unique ability to be utterly forgettable like that -- but, in hindsight, he figures he must have been a seminary student. There was a school nearby.

He had very even teeth and very even eyes and he used English with Maman, which she enjoyed and would sometimes go out of her way for, the same way she'd do for chocolates or the fancy _magasin_ with the perfumes. He came over to buy potions from her -- the harmless kind that witches market to fains as teas or cleansers -- and Gabriel remembers that he always touched his hair when he laughed, brushing it from his eyes, so that you found yourself smiling or laughing at him whenever he did it, even when he hadn't laughed first. He trained you to like him with clever tricks like that.

Most importantly, he had a way of speaking that made Maman and Nan glance at each other, sly.

"You watch out for that man," Nan said once he'd left, and the tone of her voice alone had Maman, Gabriel, and Michele all looking up. "He's a bedroom preacher."

Gabriel glanced at his sister and found her frowning back, her mouth puckered. This was an unremarkable statement. There were preachers in fain churches and preachers on fain television, and preachers in the courtyard handing out pamphlets, so it only makes sense that there should be preachers in bedrooms, too. It might be strange if they're there when you're sleeping, but only fains and White Witches sleep in bedrooms, and everyone knows that fains and White Witches are the very strangest, so.

Still, he's not the person Gabriel expects to think of when Mercury tells him to intercept a supplicant and take him to the Geneva apartment.

It's twelve years since then, Maman and Nan both burnt up with Finn, and the tenement housing where they once lived has been converted into office spaces, all modern chrome and expensive daily parking. Gabriel only visited for a few minutes, kicking the pavement squares that he sees in his mind's eye as covered in chalk, and feeling his insides move all around, trying to rearrange themselves around the grief wearing Michele's name.

"A whet?" he guesses.

Mercury's lips slice upward, cutting a smile out of her face. "A Half Code," she says, and Gabriel goes still.

There's only one Half Code in Europe. At least, only one that Mercury knows about, which means there's only one Half Code in Europe.

"When?" he asks.

"Now," says Mercury.

 

*

 

He knows he's in trouble when he sees Rose sucking at her bottom lip as she listens to him, dragging the plump of it between her teeth. She's laughing at him in that way she has, all in her eyes.

"He doesn't sound that impressive," she tosses out.

"You have to meet him," Gabriel insists. "He's someone you have to see in person. To get it. If I can get you to meet him, you'll see. You'll see."

 

*

 

Do you believe in love at first sight?

Yes? No?

At which sight is love allowed, then? Do you have to see someone fifty times before you love them? A hundred? Do you have to lay eyes on them three hundred and sixty-five days and that's it, congratulations, you've passed the test, you're now allowed to officially be in love? So anything you felt before that -- was that real?

Who decides, anyway?

You can see someone a hundred thousand times and never love them, and no one questions that.

And If you can stop loving someone between one sighting and the next, just that fast, then who's to say you can't start the same way, too?

 

*

 

It's 11am and the sunshine's pouring in through the high windows of the Geneva Airport, cutting pane-shaped squares of light onto the floor. People pour past, but the only one Gabriel cares to see is the one standing still. Behind him, the revolving doors spin like pinwheels in a summer wind, but he is dark and utterly motionless.

Gabriel watches him from his vantage point amongst seated commuters and waiting families -- long past Trev's agreed waiting time, past noon, past one, but Marcus's half-White son doesn't even so much as fidget. He keeps himself in perfect control, though there's no way he can be comfortable like that, and he doesn't seem to realize he's doing it; when Gabriel lifts a hand to finally flag him down, his face immediately contorts into a scowl.

Nathan Byrn, in motion, has sharp, starving shoulders and a sharp, starving face. He's made of the most efficient lines, from his cheekbones to his wrists to his worn-down rucksack, like someone took graphite to paper and created the most complete person with as few brushstrokes as possible. Black on white.

When he stops in front of Gabriel's table, he touches his hair, brushing it impatiently over the frames of his sunglasses, and Gabriel finds himself smiling like the good memories are already there to associate with it.

He puts his hand out, takes Nathan's wrist. _Come on._

And when he gets up, the world tips in the opposite direction, spins like a top losing its balance, and it sends his innards shifting fluidly. The sensation is so keen that for a moment, Gabriel thinks he's transforming -- that Nathan Byrn alone is turning him back into a witch, just like that.

Here's what you need to know about men like one that Nan warned Maman about, the preachers who win their converts behind bedroom doors; if they get in too close, it's useless, you're gone.

You get to thinking that if only they touch you, you'll be divine. They'll make you holy, somehow, and Gabriel leads Nathan through the subway, through the Swiss streets, doubling back and crisscrossing to confuse anyone trailing them, and Nathan might think he's following Gabriel but Gabriel's balance is off-kilter, all his awareness turned around; already, some part of him is following Nathan, will follow him everywhere.

 

*

 

If only they'll touch you, you'll be divine -- you'll remember, in your bones, what you were, what you've always been; dust or light or the pulped-over mess of your heart.

Nathan holds him against the wall by the throat.

His eyes are animal-colored, his right wrist a mangled mess of scar tissue, and now that Gabriel's seen the skeleton letters of "B" and "W" carved out of his back, he will never unsee it. The bathwater is iridescent with soot and Gabriel's body is suspended, held against the wall, and inside his chest there's an open cathedral space, stained glass and light pouring in and a soaring, _soaring_ arch -- all that space, stretching his ribs to their very limit, and there's absolutely no air to breathe.

And from that moment on, nothing about the way he feels about Nathan changes, not when he unwraps Gabriel's present with the same painstakingly slowness he'd tasted butter, like it was a luxury, not when Nesbitt describes his dead body laying in the forest litter, not when Van sends them into Gabriel's head to change him back, not when Nathan rips Mercury's belly open and then comes to lay down with him with blood on his muzzle.

Everything can shift around him, revolving doors pinwheeling, commuters hurrying through with places to be, but Nathan Byrn stays still and motionless at the very core of it all, the only certain thing visible for miles.

Gabriel loves him and it's a holy space inside of him, expanding at every casual touch, forcing his heart and his lungs and his stomach to make room for it.

 

*

 

"I can't read that," Nathan shakes his head, scowling. "I can't read."

"You read me just fine," Gabriel points out. Nathan went with him into his own head to get his magic back. He's seen every last thing ever written on Gabriel's heart, pulled each ventricle open, spread out every messy vein and read it like a map. The only thing Gabriel can think to do is to keep giving it to him.

Nathan shoots him a look. 

"That's different," he says, but he isn't frowning as much.

 

*

 

That's the thing about love, is that you have to want it.

Or ...

Maybe _want_ isn't the right word. There were probably days where Gabriel's father didn't _want_ to love his mother, but he got out of bed and did anyway. He smoked his cigarettes and mixed his paints and kept writing those letters. Oh, those letters, the ones Gabriel would later read with his cuffs pulled up over his knuckles, wiping the snot from his nose and face.

Decide.

_Decide,_ maybe, is the right word. You have to decide that it's worth it. Dad _decided_ to keep loving Maman, and even through Blanco and Roger and Abigail and Abigail's husband Finn, Maman _decided_ to love him back, and that was all the difference.

So maybe it isn't that Gabriel loved Nathan from the moment he saw him, but more that he saw him and decided, abruptly, that he wanted to _try._

You have to keep making that decision. That's what love is.

 

*

 

He decides he's going to hate Annalise O'Brien before he even sees her.

( _Deciding,_ it turns out, works just fine going the other way, too.)

She makes it easy for him, even, by being weak and White and waiting to be rescued, fidgeting around the Geneva terminal and watching the clock. It doesn't occur to him that even if she wasn't any of those things, that even if she arrived in their lives already fully formed and meeting his standards for what a loyal, rebel White Witch should be, he would find an excuse to hate her anyway, simply for being the person Nathan had pinned his tiny animal heart to, years and years and years ago. 

On some level, he's aware that this is unfair. 

The fact that Nathan doesn't love him back -- or, at least, doesn't love him the way Gabriel wants him to, where getting pinned on his back in the forest litter isn't the only way he can get Nathan's hands on him -- hadn't concerned him as much before she came along. He punishes Annalise because Nathan loves her the way Gabriel loves him. He freezes her out of conversation, keeps his aviator lenses on even when she asks if he'll please remove them, leaves her in the Geneva apartment for hours without explanation.

The satisfaction Gabriel gets from it is black and it feels slimy, but he covets it anyway, even in the face of Nathan when he finds out.

"We can't _trust_ her," he insists. "This? _This_ is bait. You said so yourself -- her brother's a Hunter --"

"So's my sister!" he fires back. "By that logic, I must be willing to drop everything and run right back to her, right? Doesn't matter what she's done to me. Jessica, Kieran -- Annalise isn't working for the Hunters, Gabriel."

"You just want to believe that."

Nathan blanks him. "Yes, I do," he says, like that's the answer, full stop. Like that's good enough.

Gabriel throws his hands up in frustration.

It's just, he's seen where this story ends, and it's Michele's body hanging by its broken neck in a tree. Just because he thinks that the genetic mixing of White and Black Witches _is_ the future -- the world, in Gabriel's completely unbiased opinion, needs more witches like Nathan -- doesn't mean he wants to get started right away. It doesn't mean he wants it to start with Nathan and Annalise. He doesn't want them to be in love. Loving a White Witch is what killed his sister.

"Do you know what that makes you?" Nathan asks, quiet. "When you compare us like that?"

He looks Gabriel in the eye as he says it, which is the only warning Gabriel gets: the next words are knives, and Nathan sticks them in, neatly, between his third and fourth rib.

"That makes you my best friend. That makes you Caitlin," and Nathan stands and walks out.

 

*

 

The things in your heart rub at you like pebbles in your shoe, and when Gabriel returns from northern Germany through the cut, carrying corrected terrain maps to the bunker in Norway (Norway, Norway -- where Nathan put his hands in his hair and his tongue in his mouth and Gabriel saw himself in the mirror over Nathan's shoulder, the look on his face,) it's to find that Nesbitt and Nathan have already scouted it and drawn a map.

Or, rather, Nathan drew a map. Nesbitt wrote in the place names, all of them with rude spellings.

On the back, where Gabriel only sees it because he's the one in charge of filing it away, there's a sketch of a tree, midway through tossing its head in a wind, a suggestion of light coming through the branches. It isn't anything that hasn't been drawn a hundred thousand times before by anyone who's ever been bored in the woods, but it's no talent Gabriel's ever had and it floors him anyway, the simplicity of that quick drawing and the feeling captured in it.

"Do you want me to take that?" Annalise asks him politely, holding open a place in Van's files for the map to go.

"What? Oh -- sure," he passes it to her, right-side up so that she won't see the drawing, but she glimpses it anyway as she slips it into the folder. He sees the exact same thing that overtook him happen to her; her face startles, and then opens all at once, a pure and sunstruck expression.

"Oh, wow -- I'd forgotten, I haven't seen anything of his since -- oh, look, with the _wind,"_ she gets out.

" _Right,"_ Gabriel agrees, because that's exactly what he'd been thinking, too.

She smiles wide enough to show all of her teeth, pleased, and they remember themselves in the next beat -- she darts him a surprised look, and it's the first time they've been anything remotely resembling friends, but if this is the one thing they can agree on, Gabriel thinks that's probably okay.

So, no, he doesn't hate her after that.

He doesn't _decide_ that, but it happens anyway.

 

*

 

(And don't tell Nathan, but Gabriel's seen this all happen before. Caitlin got Michele killed, all but tied her noose herself, just like Marcus cut the throat of that boy, Annalise's brother. So quickly, and it's done.

So Gabriel killed Caitlin. And Annalise shot Marcus.

That all makes perfect sense -- at least, it does to him.

But Nathan, he thinks, is too White to see it, and too Black to let it go. He won't forgive Annalise for that very human act, for being a biological creature of blood and instinct and reaction, for being absolutely no different than he is. But he holds Annalise to a different standard than he does himself, and she didn't stick to the script.

And he has the nerve to call _Gabriel_ unfair. Honestly.)

 

*

 

Abigail, Finn's wife, had been what Nan called a "career student." She'd been at university for almost as long as Gabriel's been in any kind of school, unable to settle on a study track that she wanted to see through to the end. She was an artist like Dad was, which is probably how Maman came to be her friend, but she liked working with clay instead of oil paints or watercolors. She'd used the pottery wheels and the kiln on-campus, even applied for a special permit to access the building when courses weren't in session.

This was around the time Gabriel turned seventeen, preoccupied with thoughts of his Giving even though he didn't really have anything to be anxious about. He didn't know it then, but this was also around the time Maman came into a sudden amount of money, and went straight to a bank in Geneva to put it away for them, like she knew she wasn't going to live long enough to need it.

On some nights, when Maman went into the city with Finn and Nan went to bed early with a migraine, Gabriel and Michele would cross the bridge to the university to see if Abigail was working on anything new.

There's something inherently indescribable about watching somebody work with a medium they're so clearly adept at -- it's comforting and inspiring, and somehow the opposite of those things at the same time -- and Gabriel and Michele rolled and assembled long-necked monsters out of stray bits of clay that fell off Abigail's wheel, slyly wiping their muddy hands on each other's clothes and complaining about it while Abigail worked. Abigail had black gauges in her ears, stretching the lobes, and she spoke French with an unapologetic American accent. Nan thought that (for a fain) she was too good for Finn, but then again, by that criteria almost anybody would be.

"What's that?" he remembers asking her once, watching her carve a design into the bottom of a soup mug.

The instrument in her hand jerked, the movement clean but also lackadaisical, like it didn't know what she wanted any more than she did. Likewise, the design looked deadly; the same pointed pattern, repeating in a circle, like flower petals, or knives. Looking at it, Gabriel can tell she hadn't gone in with a plan.

She swore, frustrated. "-- if I know," she said, and threw her tool down. "It'll probably turn out shit."

But it goes in with the rest to be fired and glazed, and Gabriel forgets about it until they're all going through the finished pieces. Abigail would pick something up, study its cracks or its warped finish or its imperfect coloring, and pass them over to them to smash, which -- being sixteen and sixteen and ten months respectively -- they took great pleasure in doing.

Abigail crouched in front of the shelves, studying one such piece (a spoon rest in the shape of a turtle; Gabriel thought the mottled blue-green of the glaze was perfect, but a lumpy bubble distorted the turtle's smiling face and made it look lopsided and demented. Abigail ran her thumb over it, frowning,) when further down the shelf, Michele suddenly gasped.

" _Gab,"_ she said. "Look at this!"

She had a soup mug in her hands, and even as he stepped over to her, protesting, "that's _not_ my name," he knew which one it was going to be.

Michele cradled it between her palms, looking down into its depths like a fortuneteller. Her hair hung suspended off the back of her neck, tied in place with a strip of lace; add a pair of hoop earrings, Gabriel thought, and the look would be complete.

"I _love_ this," she gushed, tipping the mug so he can see it. "It looks almost like a sun, don't you think? Oh, wow, Abigail, it's _so pretty."_

And Gabriel had looked over in time to see the peculiar expression on Abigail's face, watching Michele reverently handle a piece Abigail had been so sure she was going to have to smash. To her, that mug represented everything frustrating and disheartening about the act of creation, and here was Michele, seeing something Abigail didn't even know to look for.

Afterwards, Gabriel negotiated with her and settled on a price, and brought the mug home as a gift for his little sister.

It got lost somewhere between France and Dad's place in Florida. Gabriel and Michele didn't get a chance to say goodbye to Abigail -- not after Maman got her head smashed in and Finn burnt to a crisp and Dad cut Nan's chest open with a knife, the way it seems to happen in Black Witch families -- and it would have been nice to have that piece of her, at least. They hadn't been lying to Dad; there wasn't anybody who was going to miss Finn or report him missing. Especially not his wife.

In Norway, after he rips Mercury open from navel to ribs and then comes and lays his great shaggy head by Gabriel's leg and rests there until he changes back, Nathan washes himself off in the bathroom sink and --

\-- a bathroom again, why is it always bathrooms? --

\-- this is Norway, this is everything Norway will ever be, other things could exist in Norway like people or cities or parades in Oslo or whatever, but none of them will ever be as important to Gabriel as this room with the sink in Mercury's underground bunker outside Veltarlin, because this is where Nathan puts his hands in his hair and pulls them both together so that they're touching everywhere, thighs and toes and chests and mouths.

With his parents' letters as a guide, Gabriel has been throwing his love for Nathan like clay on a pottery wheel, kneading it and shaping it and trying to make something that would fit inside his chest without pain, but every attempt he's made just wound up getting smashed for one reason or another; a whole open cathedral in his chest, shards of broken clay littered and stuck in his ribs so that every breath hurt.

And then comes Nathan, who takes this messy thing Gabriel's created and decides he wants to keep it.

_You kiss all your friends like that?_

_Just you._

 

*

 

Do you believe in love at first sight?

Yes? No?

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter which sight it was, whether it was Nathan by the revolving doors in the Geneva Airport, or Nathan asleep on the terrace or Nathan tasting butter with painstaking care or Nathan drawing in the torn-out pages of Gabriel's books like he can't help it or Nathan staring back at him, waiting out his questions with that exquisite, weaponized blankness that made Gabriel want to do something _insane._

Somewhere, somewhen, Gabriel started loving Nathan Byrn, and in that moment it ruptures in him, spilling love everywhere. Everything is stained with it, all his memories soaked, and it doesn't matter when it happened, because memory makes it seem like Gabriel has loved Nathan from the moment he laid eyes on him, from the moment Trev confirmed he was coming to meet him, from the moment he heard that a Black Witch loved a White Witch and a child had been born, the same age as Michele. Gabriel has loved Nathan before himself, before either of them existed, before either of their hearts even beat.

There's a line in one of those paperbacks in the Geneva apartment about how the past is a country, and once you leave it, you can never visit it in the same way again.

When he thinks on these years, later, Nathan will be the lawnmower sound, the steam across hot tea, the air-con in the bank of this country; he is the very first place Gabriel's heart will go, every time.

 

 

-  
fin

**Author's Note:**

> "When is a monster not a monster? Oh when you love it," coincidentally, comes from Caitlyn Siehl's poem called "Start Here".
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/), if you're into that kind of thing.


End file.
